1Up - Couples Therapy Through Video Games

September 16th, 2007, 06:49

And now for something completely different…In an article ripe with psychological jargon but on the whole fairly positive, 1 Up brings us the experiences of four couples who game, and several online psychologists examine it's effect on their relationships:

World of Warcraft is rarely described as a tonic for romance -- whole communities exist dedicated to documenting the havoc online gaming is supposed to wreak on interpersonal relationships (sites like www.gamerwidow.com and www.gamingsucks.com will be more than happy to hook you up with hundreds of people who have lost the loves of their lives to games like WOW.)
Houle, however, believes Jay and Ashley are using the game to their best advantage. "The secret to their successful relationship is that they play 'together,'" he says. "and they include their friends and have community outings as well. This is a healthy relationship."

If the love of your life is playing an MMORPG then play with him/her and you won't lose him/her and you just might deepen your relationship. These people who say they have lost someone to gaming are ones who never tried to keep the relationship and I'm not talking about trying to get him/her to stop playing. If they would just try to play the game with him/her then they most likely wouldn't lose the person.

I agree. To me gaming is such a non-issue in relationship that I just don't get the jealousy angle at all. Sometimes gaming can be addictive but it's a far cry from sex drugs or rock n roll--maybe the other person is hiding in that game world for a reason. If you can't share the interests of the person you love, then develop a few interests of your own and have some live and let live going on. I spend hours on the computer, my husband spends hours reading Tom Clancy--he's not jealous of Titan Quest and I don't want to burn his library. If games is the biggest problem your relationship has, I'd count myself fortunate.

Aren't you two a bit naive?
Do you really want to deny that something like game addiction exists which can, like any other addiction, destroy friendships, relationships, families?

We're not talking about people who have gaming as their hobby but keep it in rational limits and are able to manage gaming and social life together.

Were talking about people who spend hours and hours in front of the computer and forget about anything in the real world. Yes I know we gamers dont like to talk about these people, and they may be a minority only, but its still an issue.

I personly know two examples. I have seen two rather close friends ignoring school and social life so that they could WoW instead. One got out of the obsession (to great amount due to his girlfriend) the other one is still waisting a majority of time on playing WoW.

If you have the luck that your partner likes these kinds of games and you can play them together, good for you. However, you can't expect that in most relationships. You can't expect everyone to become a full time passionate gamer for the sake of their partner.
All you can expect is for the non-playing partner to respect her friends/husbands hobby. But every relationship is give and take. So the other partner will have to limit his hobby to spend more time with his/her partner. If he doesn't do it, the relationship has a problem.
And I can imagine there are a lot of people who fail to do this. And I think that especially MMORPGs have a very high addiction-potential.

guest1

I think that it can run in all directions. Addictions to WoW and other MMO's can be a real life-destroyer as can other addictions, and like two addicts living together, MMO-addict couples can be co-dependent and not actually moving forward. Of course, sharing things is always good.

Originally Posted by guest1
Aren't you two a bit naive?
Do you really want to deny that something like game addiction exists which can, like any other addiction, destroy friendships, relationships, families?

We're not talking about people who have gaming as their hobby but keep it in rational limits and are able to manage gaming and social life together.

Were talking about people who spend hours and hours in front of the computer and forget about anything in the real world. Yes I know we gamers dont like to talk about these people, and they may be a minority only, but its still an issue.

I personly know two examples. I have seen two rather close friends ignoring school and social life so that they could WoW instead. One got out of the obsession (to great amount due to his girlfriend) the other one is still waisting a majority of time on playing WoW.

If you have the luck that your partner likes these kinds of games and you can play them together, good for you. However, you can't expect that in most relationships. You can't expect everyone to become a full time passionate gamer for the sake of their partner.
All you can expect is for the non-playing partner to respect her friends/husbands hobby. But every relationship is give and take. So the other partner will have to limit his hobby to spend more time with his/her partner. If he doesn't do it, the relationship has a problem.
And I can imagine there are a lot of people who fail to do this. And I think that especially MMORPGs have a very high addiction-potential.

Weak people will always be weak. It has nothing to do with niavety, and more to do with the bell curve. On the far left you have the weaklings that are so pathetic as to let a game control and/or wuin their lives. The far right is people who are strong enough to not let anything control their life. And then you have the majority, the normal people, that make up the vast amount of the bell curve. Normal people's lives aren't ruined by games, neither are their relationships. Don't give exceptions as the rule. Weak people will always be weak, and will always be able to be used as pawns in dramatic examples. But the bell curve is still the bell curve, weak is weak, strong is strong, and normal is normal. Let's see the numbers. And it could be that weaker people are more prone to search for an escape, and thus more prone to be sucked into WoW, where as a very strong person has more important things to do or has their priorities laid out in such a way as to not play WoW even if very interested.

Either way, the fact is, no one normal with the least amount of will and/or sense of responsibility lets WoW get in the way of their other wants and desires to a significant extent. I play WoW when I get the chance. I don't raid because it takes too much time. If I was stronger or more responsible or had my priorites laid out in a more adult way I would spend my grinding time on WoW playing with or spending more time with my kid. I fall into the normal catagory. I play, I would like to play a lot more, but I am not retarded enough play any more.

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Obviously anything that dominates your life to the exclusion of basic normal productive activities is negative, and needs to be addressed. Some people hide from life in the bottle or the needle, some in self-destructive activities of other kinds. If that's your response to stress and reality, you will find something to help you avoid it regardless. But I think these are extreme cases and not the average gaming pattern.

Nobody talks about golf or sports fanatics as addicts, though many people are frustrated with their partner's level of involvement with those things. But computer gaming "addiction" is always a witch hunt.

What I see is people using their partner's gaming as an excuse to rag on them and put on the guilt trip, equating it with desertion and abandonment(from the article):

She disagrees and admits to worrying about his capacity for videogame addiction. After all, Bill once left her at a bar to play a Wolfenstein match. (For the record, he has since apologized and sincerely regrets ever having done such a thing.)

I've seen women left at bars for a variety of reasons, usually because being in a bar in the first place means drinking, and in shaky relationships, drinking and quarreling go hand in hand. Maybe he doesn't have to endure a bunch of yelling and nagging from the Wolfenstein group. Maybe he wants to play with the friends he's had for years simply because he gets more enjoyment from that than being in a bar.
I'm saying it's the relationship that's the problem, not the gaming.

I liked the way this guy put it:

For Houle, the mere characterization of incessant gaming as an addiction is reason for worry. That's a perception that needs to change.

"If you call gaming an addiction, the relationship is lost," Houle says. We would do better to define gaming as a problem instead, says Houle. Dealing with a perceived addiction is daunting, but finding a solution to a problem is much less intimidating.

I think brain researchers and scientists will tell you that it is a lot to do with dopamine. Studies have proven that gaming actually can raise one's level of dopmaine. If a person with a low dopmine level plays a lot of say WoW, he (or she) will be rewarded with the extra amount of dopamine. Ad so, he (or she) may end up in an addiction to playing WoW.

Of course, there are people being addicted to computergames like people being addicted to everything else in this world. The old greel motto 'nothing in excess' is well worth rememering here…

My wife's cousin was actually trying to save her marriage through Online Gaming. She met her husband at her job and then they both were laid off. She went on to become a high power real estate agent and he stayed at home playing Shadowbane. He's such a good husband she has the kid in daycare until she gets home.

So she decided to get involved in his activities and it kind of became their life. When we went over for thanksgiving they got to discover I was an online gamer too and things got pretty quiet when my wife explained that its what I do AFTER work and all my other responsibilities.

This hype over video game addiction is ludicrious. Anything taken to an extreme is not healthy but given a choice of which is more damaging to one's life hands down the real addiction to drugs or alchol takes the cake. I was a speed freak but with the help of my loved ones and computer games, I was able get off of it. My girlfriend really helped me the most gave me a reason to not flush life down the tubes but with games I could busy my mind with thoughts other than "I need drugs." So I've been sober for over 6 years now and still laugh my butt off when I hear people worrying about video game addiction. If that is the biggest problem in their lives then they should count themselves lucky.

As far as how my girlfriend and work around this hobby well surprise surprise I pay attention to both of my loves. I don't just totally ignore her and go off into La La land. It's like magerette said if this was sports it would be a non issue but we're dealing with the big bad video game addiction here and christian society isn't quite sure on how to deal with it yet.

Grats to you, skavenhorde. That's a tough addiction to beat and you're to be commended. My stepdaughter went through the same thing and it was hell--she has filled the void of drugs with her husband and children and is also sober now for many years. To equate what addictions like this do to families and lives to a tendency to play too much WoW is farfetched to me also, though I know some people probably do go too far in their online world.

In the interests of fairness, I feel like I need to post this news here. In China, a man has died after a three-day-long gaming binge. Obviously, this is gaming at the addiction level, and it's especially disturbing if some of these gamers are children.